Marvel movies now make more money than Stark Industries, and with significantly less chance of being taken over by armor-suited business rivals. Just like (and with) Iron Man they’ve been building ever more spectacular things by continually upgrading what we see. The most exciting entry in the next wave was the unlikely Ant-Man, whose spotty history and unimpressive powerset were boosted by bringing the brilliant Edgar Wright on as screenwriter and director. It seemed Marvel had made enough money to have some fun, funding experiments with comedy and character in the continually-expanding caped cinema market. And now they’ve decided they’d rather not.
Wright has left the project due to the ever-vague curse of “creative differences”, but here we can still reach awful logical conclusion. We’ve seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright creates fantastic movies. Why you’d want to create differently from that we can’t imagine. The whole thing smacks of executive meddling, shadowy hands reaching down from on high to meddle with the work of a genius.
Because, you know, that always works in situations involving Ant-Man.
Hiring Edgar Wright signaled a gear-change in Marvel, a security in their success, a willingness to try new things to make sure they didn’t get stale. Letting him go – apparently after an internal rewrite which gutted his script – unfortunately signals the opposite.